A waiting game propels the plots of “Two by Pinter,” now in well-acted new productions directed by David Ellenstein for his North Coast Repertory. “The Lover” and the more frequently seen “The Dumb Waiter” make a good pairing — both are early and suspenseful one-act comedies by the late English master Harold Pinter, written before the theater world came to expect the long silences and pregnant pauses of the style dubbed “Pinteresque.”

In “The Lover,’’ an upper-middle-class man and wife enact their morning ritual. Conservatively dressed, the businessman leaves for work, his goodbye punctuated by a calmly posed question: Will she be entertaining her lover that afternoon? “The Dumb Waiter” reveals a pair of hit men, the senior pro Ben, and his chatty sidekick Gus. Two questions create the tension here. Who keeps sending unwanted food orders to their basement hideout in a clunky dumbwaiter? And who will be their next victim?

As the dapper husband Richard and perky wife Sarah in “The Lover,” Mark Pinter and Elaine Rivkin seem the image of English propriety, their bed neatly made, their manners impeccable, though he admits to spending time with his favorite prostitute partly to retaliate for her insistence on keeping the lover. There’s a subtle edge of threat in the actors’ back and forth that devolves to laughter, then escalates to menace when Sarah’s lover Max arrives and turns out to be her husband posing as a leather-clad low life with an entirely different accent.

Ellenstein (and the playwright) take the sexual charade only so far, the couple’s game leading to discreetly hidden lovemaking on the living room floor. At one point, though, the game stops being a turn-on, and Richard as Max unilaterally changes the rules, and Sarah panics before resuming her revised role. The script deftly suggests that any marriage needs much more than probity and role-playing for a relationship — and the couple’s libidos— to last.

The play mostly elicits head-shaking laughter with its precise language, careful pacing and the detailed, nearly stylized acting of Pinter and Rivkin. Whatever sadness exists in the subtext gets swept away by the self-conscious charm of the performances. Renetta Lloyd’s 1960-era costumes — sheath dresses, skinny ties — and Marty Burnett’s drawing-room set are spot on.

“The Lover” has a third character, a milkman, who makes a cameo appearance when he arrives suggestively asking Sarah if she would prefer “cream.” Actor Richard Baird proves creepily seductive in the tiny part, and returns after intermission as Gus, the younger hit man in “The Dumb Waiter.”

He’s paired with the wonderful Frank Corrado as Ben. Relaxed, real, confident in his accent and exclamations, Corrado creates the consummate straight man to Baird’s blustering, oafish Gus, this odd couple trapped as they await their next “assignment.”

Part clown show, like Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” the Pinter play elicits a different kind of laughter than “The Lover,” with the dialogue of the hired killers initially hilarious (to anyone who has been stuck speculating in a waiting room) and soon discomfiting as the tension between them mounts. At North Coast Rep, though, the sinister political undertones of “The Dumb Waiter” were almost entirely absent, at least on opening night. Baird’s extreme agitation as Gus came on too suddenly and led to a blurring of what should be a crisp, surprise ending.

Anne Marie Welsh, a former theater critic for U-T San Diego, is a San Diego arts writer.